Back from the trip and new phone.

Back from that business trip that put me offline. And now that I’m home I just upgraded my phone from my older Samsung Galaxy S4 to a new Samsung Galaxy S8.

The phone is physically larger than the S4 as is becoming the trend. After many years of the trend being for smaller and smaller phones, it reversed and is now going the other way. As some have explained it:

In my case, it’s that I read books on my phone. I have reached the point where the library in my Kindle app now dwarfs my never small physical library. The phone is still small enough, even with the Otterbox Defender case I purchased for it, to fit in a shirt pocket, or into a front pants pocket. I have a belt clip, of course (comes with the case), but that’s not always convenient to wear. So I probably don’t want to get much larger.

One of the issues with the previous phone was that it could be hard to read, even at maximum brightness, in full sun. I don’t know how this one compares in that respect. It has been persistently gloomy outside since my return.

In addition to its size, the new phone has several advantages over my old one. The icons for the apps are somewhat smaller so more fit on a screen “page”. This means that all the apps I most commonly use fit on the home screen without having to bleed over to a second screen. That’s a noticeable improvement in convenience. The phone came with 64 GB of memory. That’s more than the internal storage and Micro-SD card I had in my old phone combined. I can put in a new card.

Transferring my old data and apps to the new phone was surprisingly convenient. There’s an app that generates a QR code that let’s the two phones “talk” over WiFi for part of the process and there’s a “null modem” adapter that lets the two talk over a USB cable to complete the process.

The only thing that didn’t go through was my playlists. I used Doubletwist as my main music player. The music files went across but the playlists did not so rebuilding them is taking a bit of time.

Overall, I’ve been very happy with the new phone so far. And the old one is packed away as a “backup” in case this one is lost or damaged.